SUMMARY OF THE TECHNOLOGY:
It’s called a “pig” ( Sorry to Muslims out there ).
One of the major ways pipeline operators detect corrosion is with a “pig,” a machine that travels down the inside of a pipeline looking for problems.
Pigs are not new — the industry has long relied heavily on them—and the newest generation of pigs, known as “smart pigs,” is considered an improvement over the pigs of yesterday. Smart pigs give a read on the state of the pipeline, such as cracks, corrosion, and metal loss. Operators receive this information in a control room and can then dispatch crews to fix the problem. As of 2012, 93 percent of pipeline inspections were conducted using smart pigs.
The real innovation comes from the Pipeline safety company Fox-Tek, a subsidiary of Augusta Industries (CVE: AAO), which uses such a system to detect corrosion, as well as a fiber optic system to detect bends, strains and stress in pipelines.
Theirs is its data analytics package. Companies that use smart pigs usually need to spend months doing post-inspection analysis, but Fox-Tek has developed proprietary software that does continuous and automatic analysis.
Fox-Tek’s sensors gather information and automatically send back confidential reports on everything the company needs to know – temperature, pressure, strain, rates of corrosion, etc. in the form of handy graphs, charts and diagrams. It eliminates the need for an army of people to go out and inspect pipelines and then come back to do the analysis.
The pipeline safety market is massive and growing, but one of the major hurdles for new technologies like advanced sensors and software will be reluctance by pipeline companies to proactively invest in corrosion management and maintenance. In the past, they have largely focused on the bare minimum and viewed safety as a regulatory requirement.
Back in the '80s I was a programmer for a rent-a-rig oil company. One of my projects was to write an engine oil analysis program. The deal was to check for unusual amounts of contaminants. (Metals off the top of my head). If there was an increase in barium, it meant the main bearings in a diesel engine were going, silica meant sand getting past the filters, etc.
I marveled that it was no wonder we were world leaders, doing stuff like that and mentioned the neatness of it to my boss, who was a retired Navy commander. He said the Navy had been doing that for a long time and gave me a truism that has stuck with me ever since: "You can't prevent breakdowns but you can control them".
That came to mind when I had to write a preventive maintenance program - inspect this every week, that every month, etc. That was incorporated into a mechanics work order list, so that when he went in to repair an engine, for instance, all the other repairs due were also shown so that if he had to take apart some module, he could fix any other parts associated with it.
Those people really had their act together.